President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  According to Welles: Welles, Diary, 1:25.

  Lincoln not only held no grudge against Meigs: To the proposal that Meigs should be promoted to the important post of quartermaster general (the top supply man for the whole army), Secretary of War Cameron that first summer wrote a terse message to the president telling him that a Colonel Thomas was the oldest in point of service in the Quartermaster Corps—obviously reflecting a departmental preference for the senior Thomas over the younger Meigs. Lincoln then wrote to General Winfield Scott:

  Executive Mansion

  June 5, 1861

  My dear Sir

  Doubtless you begin to understand how disagreeable it is to me to do a thing arbitrarily, when it is unsatisfactory to others associated with me.

  I very much wish to appoint Col. Meigs Quarter-Master General; and yet Gen. Cameron does not quite consent. I have come to know Col. Meigs quite well for a short acquaintance, and, so far as I am capable of judging I do not know one who combines the qualities of masculine intellect, learning and experience of the right sort, and physical power of labor and endurance so well as he…

  You will lay me under one more obligation, if you can and will use your influence to remove Gen. Cameron’s objection. I scarcely need tell you I have nothing personal in this, having never seen or heard of Col. Meigs, until the end of last March.

  Your obt. Servt

  A. Lincoln

  “For a daring and dangerous enterprise”: Lincoln to G. V. Fox, in Thompson and Wainwright, Confidential Correspondence, p. 44.

  CHAPTER FIVE. DAYS OF CHOICES: TWO APRIL SUNDAYS

  “policy which the federal executive is to pursue”: CW, 4:329–30; also see Richmond Virginia Convention, April, 8, 1861, AL Papers.

  “It is with deep regret”: CW, 4:330.

  “drafted by himself”: N&H, 4:77.

  “that the loyal states had suffered”: N&H, 4:78.

  invigorating shot of clarified resolve: B. H. Liddell Hart called it “that vast human sigh of relief” and remarked in 1929 that it was “one of the most recurrent phenomena in history, marking the outset of every great conflict down to 1914.” One could continue the story to 1939 in Europe, 1941 in the United States, and beyond. See Charles Royster, “Fort Sumter: At Last the War,” in G. Boritt, ed., Why the Civil War Came (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  “While discussing the proclamation”: N&H, 4:79.

  “You, gentlemen, come here”: James G. Randall, Lincoln the President (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977), vol. 1, pt. 2, p. 365. All citations from Randall’s Lincoln are to this edition, which reproduces the original four-volume work published in 1945 by Dodd, Mead & Company. The Da Capo edition is divided into two volumes, each consisting of two parts. All notes herein are from Volume 1, Springfield to Gettysburg.

  “The President, at once”: Mayor Brown Report, N&H, 4:124.

  “a clear, flagrant, and gigantic case”: Letter to Erastus Corning and others, June 12, 1863, CW, 6:264.

  “in exceedingly narrow terms”: Don E. Fehrenbacher, Lincoln in Text and Context (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), p. 122.

  “I there upon summoned my constitutional advisers”: CW, 5:241; Lincoln’s May 26, 1862, message to the House, quoted throughout this section, is found on pp. 240–43.

  “Slavery was killed years ago”: Francis B. Carpenter, The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln: Six Months at the White House (1866; repr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 72–74.

  “General Scott received him kindly”: N&H, 4:103–4.

  “proved false to the hand which had pampered them”: July 4, 1861, Message to Congress, CW.

  There were significant defections: Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, 4 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959–71), 1:108.

  “When I took charge of the Navy Department”: Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 1:19.

  “Any amount of feverish rumors”: Hay’s diary entry for April 21, 1861, in Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), p. 6.

  “Day after day prediction failed”: N&H, 4:151.

  “I don’t believe there is any North”: John Hay’s diary entry for April 24, 1861, in Burlingame and Ettlinger, Inside, p. 11.

  “Why don’t they come?”: N&H, 4:152.

  Washington in those April days: Randall, Lincoln the President, vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 363.

  Scott had chosen: Nevins, War for the Union, 1:79.

  “[T]he national capital”: Ibid. Nevins does not say where he learned that the defenders of the capital were flat-chested.

  “a man who couldn’t cut a chicken’s head off”: William C. Davis, Lincoln’s Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 177.

  “Allow the President to invade”: Lincoln to Herndon, February 15, 1848, CW, 1:451.

  “attempt to divide and destroy”: July 4, 1861, Message to Congress, CW.

  “Those who were in the federal capital”: N&H, 4:156.

  CHAPTER SIX. REALISM RIGHT AT THE BORDER

  If all three of these slave states: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 284.

  “In the four Border States”: Ibid.

  The historian William Freehling has remarked: William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 57.

  “In 1860, slaves accounted”: Ibid., p. 50.

  The opposition to Yankee invaders: “A week into the Civil War, with so many different types of borderites aching to consider the war an anti-American mistake, the mistake invaded Baltimore. The city’s motley mob trampled all over the mistake and then with Yankee troops gone from center city, went back to trading with the North.” Ibid.

  “sent an imploring request”: Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), p. 12.

  “The question has been submitted”: Lincoln to Winfield Scott, April 25, 1861, CW, 4:344.

  “They called Benjamin Butler a Beast”: Freehling, South vs. South, p. 51.

  “the state…be spared the evils”: CW, 4:356.

  The poem was written: Jean Baker, The Politics of Continuity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 69. Baker tells about the poem and the song, written by “Baltimore-born James Ryder Randall after the Baltimore riot in April 1861 while he was teaching at a Louisiana College.”

  “Gen’l: After full consultation”: Stephen W. Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860–1865 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), p. 99.

  “the activities of the army”: Baker, Politics, pp. 71–72.

  “Maryland was made to seem”: CW, 5:49.

  “Which Virginia?”: Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, 4 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), 1:138. After the Virginia convention voted a secession ordinance on April 17, former senator James Mason traveled to Maryland to talk to the legislature of the sister state about joining the rebellion.

  East Virginia in 1860: John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), p. 138.

  Wheeling, a river city: McPherson, Battle Cry, p. 298.

  “The right of revolution can be exercised”: Nicolay, Outbreak, p. 139.

  the minute that secession was proposed: Edward Conrad Smith, The Borderland in the Civil War (New York: Macmillan, 1927), p. 202. The official returns have been lost, and there were charges of intimidation in opposite directions on both sides of the mountains. When the Virginia secession ordinance was submitted to a vote of the people on May 23, the citizens in the twelve counties farthest north and west, in stark contrast to those back east, voted against it ten
to one.

  A rump legislature: Randall, who objects to much in the making of West Virginia, more than once notes the injustice that the makers of the new state attached to the previous forty-eight counties the two counties (Jefferson and Berkeley) farthest east, which compose the peculiarly shaped Eastern Panhandle, when the population of those counties was “almost universal” in adhering to old Virginia and to secession. J. G. Randall and David Herbert Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction, 2nd ed. (Boston: Heath, 1961), pp. 239, 242. There may be a thoroughly realistic Union explanation: adding those two counties to West Virginia meant that the entire route of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was in Union-controlled territory.

  “Pierpoint”: The spelling of the governor’s name varies not only according to whether there is an “i” in the second syllable (point instead of pont) but also whether the “e” and the “i” are reversed in the first. The governor’s messages to Lincoln are signed “Peirpoint,” which evoked what may be a faint glint of humor in the notes to Lincoln’s Collected Works, perhaps the only humor in the eight volumes that does not come from Lincoln’s own hand. The note on page 511 of volume 4 on a letter from the governor reads: “The letter is signed ‘F. H. Peirpont,’ and this spelling is followed throughout the present work rather than ‘Pierpoint’ or ‘Pierpont’ on the assumption that the governor is entitled to spell his name as he chooses, other considerations notwithstanding.” But then a scholar who had dealings with the governor’s daughter spelled it “Pierpont,” claiming “he himself adopted that spelling in later life.” See Smith, Borderland, pp. 214, 215. One can find three, possibly four, spellings spread across the materials about the first days of West Virginia. One should note, however, that Peir-Pier-point-pont was never governor of West Virginia but only of the state of Virginia as Restored, with the capital first in Wheeling and then in Alexandria.

  by the end of 1861 had raised many more troops: Smith, Borderland, p. 217.

  “We all know—everybody knows”: N&H, 6:309.

  “It is said that the admission of West-Virginia is secession”: When he read through the cabinet opinions, he made marginal corrections that narrowed the issue. When Chase mentioned states “formed” within the boundaries of an old state, Lincoln noted that to “admit” is not to “form.” In other words, the question that came to the Congress and now to the president was only whether to admit an already formed state. And then when both Chase and Seward mentioned the consent by “the state” to this action, he put in the margin the correction that the Constitution specifies that the consent shall be by the legislature, which, interpreting what he is thinking, we may say, is more specific than “the state.” And he is picking these nits because he has his own answers to the objections to the legislature of “restored” Virginia. Writing this out on the last day of 1862, one would think with some haste, on the day before the huge event of his Emancipation Proclamation, he gave his opinion on the statehood bill:

  The consent of the Legislature of Virginia is constitutionally necessary to the bill for the admission of West-Virginia becoming a law. A body claiming to be such Legislature has given its consent. We can not well deny that it is such, unless we do so upon the outside knowledge that the body was chosen at elections, in which a majority of the qualified voters of Virginia did not participate. But it is a universal practice in the popular elections…to give no legal consideration whatever to those who do not choose to vote.

  The nonvoters in this case are not just undutiful citizens; they are opponents of the government:

  [T]hey were not merely neglectful of their rights under, and duty to, this government, but were also engaged in open rebellion against it…Can this government stand, if it indulges constitutional constructions by which men in open rebellion against it, are to be accounted, man for man, the equals of those who maintain their loyalty to it?

  “Kentucky will furnish no troops”: OR, ser. 3, vol. 1, p. 70.

  “A public meeting of leading citizens”: N&H, 4:228.

  “I should have dispatched”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 4, p. 185.

  “I had information”: Ibid.

  “[T]he people of Kentucky”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 1, pp. 185–86.

  “General Polk has been ordered”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 4, p. 189.

  “General Polk: the necessity justifies the action”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 4, p. 181.

  “Governor Harris and others”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 4, p. 188.

  “Kentucky has been invaded”: Smith, Borderland, p. 301.

  Lincoln responded by sending: The exchange between Frémont and Lincoln can be found in CW, 4:506, 517. See the notes.

  “I was so assured”: Lincoln to Orville Browning, September 22, 1861, CW, 4:532.

  Lincoln took comfort: The objection to his order to Frémont that most surprised Lincoln came from his old friend Orville Browning, now (since his appointment in June to succeed Stephen Douglas) senator from Illinois. Browning was by no means one of the shrill whistles of radicalism; on the contrary—on most issues at most times he was more conservative than Lincoln. But here he was, endorsing Frémont’s order as a good move, approved by all loyal citizens of the West and Northwest. Lincoln took time to write a careful letter to Browning setting forth his argument against Frémont’s order. One part of what he wrote had to do with constitutional propriety, and since just one year later Lincoln would himself emancipate slaves by proclamation, we may postpone that section of the letter for later treatment. But the gravamen of the letter had to do with political effect and with Kentucky, implicitly with timing. This is the letter in which he wrote that “to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.” But the Union did not lose Kentucky.

  “the cause of the Union [in Kentucky]”: Smith, Borderland, p. 293.

  “Fortunately for the national government”: Ibid., p. 294.

  “each party WITHIN”: Lincoln address at Peoria, October 16, 1854.

  “While anti-slavery men were the first to organize migration”: David Potter, The Impending Crisis (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1976), p. 200.

  a short, intense, no-nonsense Connecticut Yankee: General Nathaniel Lyon, in the view of his supporters the “Savior of Missouri,” came from Connecticut, went to West Point, and fought in Mexico; up to that point he supported the Democrats. But then he was assigned to Fort Riley in Kansas, under invasion by Missouri bushwhackers, and switched his politics to become a strong antisecession Republican. Jim Lane also came to Kansas as a Democrat and switched under the impact of border attacks.

  “Sir: The President of the United States directs”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 1, p. 675.

  On May 29 Blair handed Harney: OR, ser. 1, vol. 3, p. 381. A certain confusion about command had prevailed through April and May. The official records in a footnote at one point say, with quite uncharacteristic inexactitude, “[Harney] had relinquished command April 23 pursuant to orders of April 21, and Captain Nathaniel Lyon, second U.S. Infantry, seems to have exercised command during General Harney’s absence.” Very rarely does one read, in the official records of the American armed forces, the puzzled inexactitude that an officer “seems to have exercised command.” After May 29 Lyon, now lifted up as a brigadier general of the volunteers, undoubtedly exercised command.

  “Lincoln’s policies were fairly successful”: William E. Gienapp, “Abraham Lincoln and the Border States,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 13 (1992), p. 46.

  “When questioned about military repression”: Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 49–50.

  “With the matters of removing”: Lincoln to Gen. John M. Schofield, October 1, 1863, CW, 6:492.